I am a restless writer of fiction, film, and music. I scripted such films as 9 and ½ Weeks, Sommersby, Impromptu (personal favorite), What Lies Beneath, and All I Wanna Do which I also directed. Both my documentaries, Marjoe and Thoth, won Academy Awards. Formerly a recording artist, I continue to write music, posting songs on my website. I live in New York with my husband James Lapine. My second novel, the paranormal thriller Jane Was Here, was published in 2011. My latest film, Learning to Drive, starring Patricia Clarkson and Ben Kingsley, came out in August 2015, now available on VOD, DVD, and streaming media.
This blog is a paranormal memoir-in-progress, whenever I have spare time. It's a chronicle of my encounters with ghosts, family phantoms, and other forms of spirit.

Monday, September 1, 2014

At Home With a Ghost - 51

Dad with his parents: hoisting Carrie as Marshall looks on. Note the cigarette in her hand: small wonder she had a "graveyard cough."

(Those who are coming to this serialized story for the first time, you can read the complete opus to date by clicking here.)

My long-departed grandfather wasn’t done spilling the beans
through this Montreal medium. Across the dimensional divide, Monsieur Guy Isabel’s
spirit guide continued to compel his hand as he covered another page with
automatic writing, in a script that appeared both elegant and awkward.

I waited, still recovering from the news that my grandmother
Carrie, through all thirty-five years of her marriage, conducted an affair with
her doctor, and with Grandpa’s full knowledge.

I knew all about Dr. Taylor from my father’s memoir, and
from the letters Carrie wrote to her family from France during World War I.

At the height of the war, Dr. Kenneth Taylor, a New York
pathologist, volunteered his services to an American military hospital in
Paris. While there, he developed a successful treatment for gas gangrene, for
which he later received the Légion d’Honneur. In 1915 he returned to New York. The
following year he was summoned back to Paris to take over as hospital chief. He
boarded an ocean liner with his wife Ann and a volunteer nurse named Caroline
Hatch.

The three had become friendly in New York. I surmise that
Ken Taylor encouraged Carrie Hatch to come along and serve in the war effort. Maybe
their attraction had already begun. He put her to work in the wards, where she
found her calling as angel to the wounded. He found her placements at other
hospitals; he made house visits when she was ill, which was often. (It wouldn’t
have aroused any suspicion when she had a man in her room at her pension, if that man was her doctor.)

“What I should do without him I cannot imagine,” she wrote
her sister.

She didn’t have to do without Dr. Taylor, as it turned out.
Along came Lieutenant Marshall Kernochan with a marriage proposal, along with his
assurance that, if she said yes, he wouldn’t “pluck one feather out of that
cherished independence” of hers. She would be free to do whatever she wanted.

Even adultery?

Carrie put off accepting Grandpa’s proposal. She sailed back
to New York without giving him an answer; she needed more time, “to try to put
certain things out of my mind.” Likely she believed her affair with Ken Taylor
was hopeless. Continuing as the backdoor woman of a married man was an
unthinkable demotion; she was too proud for that. But what if she too was
married? Marshall’s wealth and social position guaranteed her respectability
and, if he kept his promise, the freedom to pursue her heart.

So she said yes to all that. Her return passage and visa
were arranged by Ken Taylor. The Taylors were witnesses at Carrie and Marshall’s
wedding. At the end of the war, the four reassembled their weird ménage in New
York. Marshall and Carrie Kernochan had a son named Jack (my dad). Ken and Ann
Taylor had a daughter. Carrie instated Ken as the family physician; if little
Jackie Kernochan had a sniffle, Dr. Taylor would instantly appear. Marshall bought
a studio for Carrie where she could enjoy some privacy; the apartment was
practically next door to the Taylors. The four got together sometimes for
evening musicales or theater outings, but more often Marshall was off at the
Freemasons or his mens’ clubs, and Carrie and Ken were off doing…something or
other together.

When he got older Dad became aware that something in this
picture wasn’t right. He started teasing his mother about it. Whenever she
announced she was going to sunny Florida (for her lungs), with the good doctor in
attendance (for her lungs), Dad would start rotating his pelvis and singing a
current pop song, “Hear that savage serenade/ Down there in the Everglade/ Goes
boom-a-diddy booma-diddy booma-diddy-boom.” Later he took to referring to Dr.
Taylor simply as “Booma-Diddy.”

“She would be embarrassed,” he wrote, “blushing and giggling
uncomfortably, but in no way daunted.” Finally Dad asked his father “point-blank,
how he felt about my mother’s absences and her obvious inclinations toward the
doctor. His response was: ‘When I look around and see some of the women my
friends have married, I consider myself a lucky man.’”

Grandpa was probably referring to Mrs. Booma-Diddy.

When Marshall first met the Taylors in Paris, he wrote
Carrie that “Mrs. T seemed a bit difficult. Dr. T scarcely opened his head.” Their act never changed. My dad observed that
whenever the T’s came a-calling on the K’s, Ann Taylor invariably showered
contempt on her husband, and she didn’t seem to care who was witnessing. While
she loudly berated him, the doctor shrank a few sizes and said nothing. She was
also rumored to be having an affair with a Columbia professor. Carrie’s studio increasingly
became Dr. Taylor’s home away from home as he escaped his ballbusting wife’s
company.

And what better companion for Carrie than a doctor? “She was
both morbidly obsessed with illness and prone to it,” my father wrote. From his
earliest years Dad found that a surefire way to get his mother to pay any
attention to him at all was to fake alarming symptoms, for she loved nothing
better than to play nurse. The woman herself was a dartboard for afflictions. A
partial list of her chronic ailments would include: hay fever, bronchitis,
pneumonia, brucellosis, back pain and agonizing periods. Even the World War I
courtship letters between Carrie and Marshall often jokingly referred to her
“g.y.c.,” which stood for “graveyard cough.”

With the dear doctor, she had someone who took her every
ache seriously, and was only too willing to talk symptoms and treatments. (Though
she might have lived longer if he had made her stop smoking.) He was hopeless
company when it came to her other interests, like music and painting; Dr.
Taylor was “unmusical to his fingertips, and as a painter he would have flunked
a Rorschach test.” They did have bird watching in common; they embarked on
their hikes alone and often in Martha’s Vineyard, where the Taylors were
frequent guests. When not hunting herons, Carrie and her medicine man could
always repair to her little house on the bluff, far from the madding wife and
the unfazed husband.

Dad wondered, “Was there a sexual relation between my mother
and the doctor? I will never know. Perhaps at this point in life she was
entitled to yield to inclinations that made her one and only life happy and
bearable.”

If I believed the ghostwritten messages conveyed by this clairvoyant
medium by Skype, my Dad’s question was now answered. And there was more to
come. I watched Monsieur Isabel onscreen as he put down his pencil. He then
read aloud what the spirits had just written through his hand: “Marshall says
he tolerated her affair because he wasn’t always there, and he felt guilty
about the life he led and he wanted Carrie to be happy…”

“He says ‘I myself saw other people. I too had sexual
affairs, though not with women.’”

Guy Isabel was the third medium to mention my grandfather
was gay, which I had suspected for some time. As my Skype session wore on, I
learned that Marshall had loved a fellow Freemason, someone from Europe whom he
must have met in his travels. The Masonic temple, a brotherhood shrouded in
secrecy, provided the perfect camouflage for their affair. Sixty years after
his death, Marshall wrote his confession on the medium’s page: “I discovered my
soul could join with another soul in love, even if that soul was in the body of
a man.”

This, then, was the essence of my grandparents’ marriage.
Carrie put up with his homosexuality, and he looked away from her adultery.

When I consider this bizarre minuet between the T’s and
K’s, I think of a photo I found among Marshall’s effects. The occasion shown is
the annual Tuxedo Park costume ball. We inherited a trunk full of disguises
from this fabled affair, which Grandpa adored dressing for, ordering
custom-made outfits for himself and Carrie every year. We kids used to try on
the stuff, swimming in silks and velvet brocade: there was a Revolutionary War
soldier getup, a toreador, a sheik, a harem girl, Queen of the Night. There was
also an oversize white satin smock with huge buttons of real mink. No one knew
what that was about until I found this photo. The men are clad as lovelorn Pierrots
in fools’ hats and satin nightshirts. On bended knee, they court their wives
dressed as alluring Columbines.

Tuxedo Park costume ball, or, go figure the rich

Once we get done laughing our asses off at this spectacle,
we can open our ears and hear the chamber orchestra playing; we can see the
dancers change partners. We can ponder, how many aristos in that ballroom were conducting
secret affairs, like Marshall and Carrie? Meanwhile they keep step with high
society’s twirl; keep up appearances in custom disguises.

I had no more questions for Monsieur Isabel or any medium
after that. The last pieces of the puzzle, thought to be lost, had been retrieved
and pressed into place.

You may well wonder how any sane person could accept as
truth the ad-libs of clairvoyants and mediums (I consulted five in all). But I
am not sane. I’m something worse: a fiction writer. I’d inherited an unfinished
history, with massive plot holes and cloudy characters. I needed to understand
my grandfather, who I believe has been with me in spirit form since his death. Frustrated,
I wanted to fix the story and restore its flow, and I really didn’t care where
the missing answers came from, so long as loose ends got tied and one could put
the book down with a sigh of satisfaction.

And so my tale is done.

My attachment to spirits, and Grandpa’s ghost in particular,
was not continuous throughout my life.
When I got married in 1985, I gave up ghosts. It
was time to dial it down the wack and get back to my day job: to be a
presentable wife and mother, a person of sound reasoning
– though if someone
prodded me I might tell a ghost story or two. For ten years I concentrated on
putting hot meals on the table and achieving success as a screenwriter.

One day I got a call from Nina Jacobson, who had just gone
to work at a brand new studio called DreamWorks. I’d done a script for her
before, when she was a development executive at Universal; the script had been
about a satanic college fraternity, so she knew I was fluent in paranormal.
Would I, she asked, be interested in writing a script for Steven Spielberg,
one of DreamWorks’ three partners? The project was then being referred to as “Untitled
Ghost Story.”